Posted
by
samzenpus
on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @02:11PM
from the pleistocene-park dept.

Many scientists (mainly Japanese and Russian) have dreamed of cloning a mammoth over the years. When the mammoth genome was partially reconstructed in 2008, that dream seemed a bit closer. Besides the millions of dollars needed for such a project, the biggest hurdle was the lack of a good sample of mammoth DNA. That hurdle has now been cleared, thanks to the discovery of well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thigh bone. Russian scientist Semyon Grigoriev, acting director of the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum, and colleagues from Japan's Kinki University say that within 5 years they'll likely have a clone. From the article: "What's been missing is woolly mammoth nuclei with undamaged genes. Scientists have been on a Holy Grail-type search for such pristine nuclei since the late 1990s. Now it sounds like the missing genes may have been found."

Seems less likely than Jurassic Park to attract enough tourists to keep such a venture solvent. Besides...what can they really do with one set of DNA? You bring one back from the dead as it were, but wouldn't you need at least two (male and female) to re-start the species...and several to have any remotely healthy genetic diversity? Frozen specimens have shown what the animal was like...not sure what more could be learned from a living example?

Yeah.... and the longer I do systems administration on Microsoft Windows based networks, the more of my hair turns gray. No beard though....

Reporter: Wow! he looks so old! He must be ancient! Sir! Sir!! Over here Sir! What is your secret to a long and healthy life?Greybeard: Women! Women in the morning! Women in the afternoon! Women at night?Reporter: And how old are you if you don't mind me asking, sir?Greybeard: On Tuesday I'll be 26.

It might be possible to crossbreed them with elephants, but even one animal would be a huge success, as it would lead to the development of methodology to revive an extinct animal, and with the global extinction of today, there will be need for such technology.

That's an interesting question! People regularly throw around the number 40 as being the minimum number of people to keep a diverse gene pool going, could that roughly be true for mammoths too? Could they splice in enough genetic material from other partial strands of mammoth DNA to get 40 complete, but slightly different mammoths cloned and breeding? And second, where are you going to find enough space and money to house your herd of mammoth mammoths?

People regularly throw around the number 40 as being the minimum number of people to keep a diverse gene pool going, could that roughly be true for mammoths too?

"Throw around" sounds about as precise as this is. There isn't a huge amount of actual data about this.

If you look at every colonisation of any island by any species, then the minimum that is needed to start a colony is the arrival of a single pregnant female. For long-lived, slow breeding species such as humans (and elephants, and presumably mammoths), that's likely to be very dodgy on both the population genetics front, and the simple question of whether or not there are enough hands to feed enough mouths.

But in practice, that's not how things would happen. If you have a classical colonisation scenario of your beasties being caught on vegetation rafts in a flood (or on ice floes) every few decades, and carried to Terra Nova, then there's a reasonable chance of a newcomer arriving in the incipient colony every few decades. And it doesn't particularly matter if it's a male or female that arrives. That does a lot of good for population genetics.

There was a study published a few years ago of a wolf pack in southern Sweden. They're isolated from the main Finno-Russian population by a combination of tough landscape and many miles of unfriendly farmers, despite them being a protected species. The pack was, for a long time (I haven't read the paper for several years!), in pretty desperate straits genetically, with poor breeding success, and to the researchers following them were seeing a variety of diseases of in-breeding. (They could do a complete unambiguous family tree by doing DNA analyses on wolf turds, and track new pups.) The pack's size was stable at around a dozen, despite there being abundant wild(-ish) land and game for the pack to expand into. Then in the mid-90s one single solitary male (I think) wolf managed to make it through the gauntlet of central Sweden to meet up with the pack. Within a few years the pup count was rising rapidly, and the degree of consanguinity in the pups was dropping substantially. That's the effect of, literally, one incomer.

So, although 40-odd may be bandied around as a minimum safe population size, it's not a well-founded figure. It's also likely to be a decidedly different figure for different species.

Returning to the mammoth population subject : If I were planning a cloning/ breeding programme, I'd probably start by trying to clone a male. (Reasoning : the first one off the production line is going to be a "learning experience", and you really want to get your cows right for breeding from.) Then, learning lessons from "M1" and continuing genetic analysis of the raw material from new mammoth finds, I'd work on preparing my first cow : "F1".

(I've already realised that I'd have to do some careful background research to try to identify a restricted population of mammoth genetic material, in both time and space ; there's likely a lot of endemism in the populations, and mixing dissimilar genomes could cause issues. Say, one population has digestive genes optimised for grasses, while another population lived on leaves from trees... not good to mix them, at least not while learning mammoth biology.)

Back to the population : I've now got a (probably flawed) M1 and an F1 (hopefully better). It's going to be years before F1 is fit to attempt to breed, so I'd now turn back to trying to make a better M2 (say I'm only going to get to use one elephant's uterus per year). Then F2 ; then F3 ; then F4. By now, I'll be getting close to being able to breed off F1 (I think ; IANA mammoth keeper ; then again, no-one else is), so I'd better start to attend to my stock of males. I'm making the (not unjustified) assumption that modifying male's sperm is going to be cheaper and easier than modifying eggs, so I can use more-or-less off the shelf genetic engineering techniques to bring parts of

According to the wiki, 150-200 randomly chosen individuals will be stable for 80 generations or more. But then, the Amish were founded with around 200 members originally, and while they are certainly still around they have much higher rates of genetic disorders (and then again, many of those 200 were probably related before they isolated themselves). It's not an easy question to answer.

Something like this:40 is for individes with diverse genes and with careful planing. ("generation ship" with 40 carefully chosen people for all over the world)150-200 is for randomly chosen individuals (almost) randomly fucking each other. ("new world ship" not filled with sects members)1700-2700 is for individes that already live close to each other and where most individes have a few relatives, (A small town getting isolated when the zombies attack.)

Behaviour. The genome is are the 'building blocks' of the creature, and like building blocks, they don't tell you in isolation how warm the building is, if the building is noisy or quiet, or if the building lives happily with sabre-tooth tigers....

It's a totally new kind of nature vs nurture experiment, and a step beyond 'Dolly'.Dolly and her twin both grew up with other sheep, went 'baa' and ate grass - but will this mammoth behave like a elephant if kept with elephants? What if it's not influenced by ot

Or you could just clone the one indefinitely. It's already being done in other animals. The important of genetic diversity should not be forgotten, though in the case of an extinct animal, it's probably not the primary concern.

In one of Heinlein's books, a character has himself cloned with one major change: his Y chromosome is replaced with another copy of his own X. This results in two cloned "daughters".
Of course, the offspring of the original male organism and the female clone would be as inbred as a creature can be. Plus it would express any recessive traits on the X chromosome. I wonder if the offspring could be kept alive for enough generations to produce diversity through mutation... and whether it would be monstrousl

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat. They couldn't survive the end of the last ice age. So lets bring them to life and stick them in a post/anti-Ice Age environment... Brilliant!

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat.

Today isn't particularly hot, even by the standards of the time since the last ice age, and much of Russia is often extremely cold.

In any case, the next ice age should be along at some point in the next few thousand years, so we might as well get prepared. A mammoth will be much more useful as transport than a Prius when the planet is covered with mile-thick ice and the temperature is permanently below zero.

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat.

Today isn't particularly hot, even by the standards of the time since the last ice age, and much of Russia is often extremely cold.

In any case, the next ice age should be along at some point in the next few thousand years, so we might as well get prepared. A mammoth will be much more useful as transport than a Prius when the planet is covered with mile-thick ice and the temperature is permanently below zero.

That's because we haven't had any Mammoths to hunt. Soon the whole spear industry will be booming again. I'm not sure, but I think IBM holds the patent rights and collects royalties from anyone who gives anyone else the shaft, which should cover all future spear or shaft based technologies. I hear Microsoft and Apple both pay billions just for the right to give anyone the shaft at any time and the US government pays in the trillions.

I doubt that humans were a major impact on the Mammoth population.1. They were big and dangerous. While perhaps once in a while their might be a mighty mammoth hunt, but for the most part lets hunt bison for a big catch. But normally hairs and fowl.

2. Humans really are not well adapted for the cold. Mammoths like the cold... People do not. Sure there are some colonies who have made it. But no large cities large enough to decimate a population.

Humans had a huge impact on Mammoths, that's well-established. The standard hunting technique for big game appears to have been to trigger a stampede off a cliff. You should also remember that humans primarily hunted Pygmy Mammoth, not the giant kind, and that humans lived right up to the ice sheet during the Ice Age (and even hunted beyond it). Neandertals and Denisovians were the primary hominids living in extremely cold climates, but modern humans were quite capable of enduring extreme climates provided some sort of food existed. (Fishing from boats turns out to have been an extremely ancient technology.)

Having said that, Mammoth diversity was dropping long before humans even reached places like the Americas, so there were clearly other factors involved.

Look people like the image of the stone-age human hunter taking the huge bull mammoth down with a spear, perhaps working in groups... it's a very popular image for that reason. But it's utter nonsense. There's no hard evidence mammoths were ever hunted by humans. There is some evidence that mammoth meat was consumed by humans, which is often conflated, but scavenging food isnt the same thing as hunting. There is even some evidence that mammoths may occasionally have been killed by humans - but it was more likely an opportunistic event than a planned hunt. A small, young mammoth that happened to get cut off from its group? An isolated individual that got stuck in a bog? Sure, some of that would have happened, and humans would certainly seize the opportunity, but that's a far cry from actually going out to hunt healthy, full-grown mammoths with a stone spear.

Wooly mammoths were quite a bit larger and more dangerous than todays African elephant. And we have one and only one known case of a human group hunting African elephants without firearms. Pygmy hunters in central africa do it and have apparently done it for centuries. BUT they dont do it with stone spears - they use bows and arrows coated with a potent poison. And even so, they often lose hunters. For even a large group of humans armed with Clovis technology to attack a full grown african elephant, let alone a mammoth, would be suicidally foolish.

Elephants arent just HUGE animals, they are also quite intelligent. They are also social animals and move in groups. Another large (though much smaller) animal that also moves in groups and certainly WAS hunted at the time is the bison - but not only are even the extinct, gigantic species of bison still much smaller than a mammoth, there is a huge difference in their group behaviour. Bison are much more cow-like, and can be stampeded easily. And THIS is how they were actually hunted - whole herds were stampeded into fatal falls, then the humans went in to salvage meat and other material from the corpses afterwards. This is a much smarter tactic than trying to take one down with a spear (though also extraordinarily wasteful,) and in fact we know that is exactly how our ancestors did it. But that tactic just doesnt work on elephants.

So, no, mammoth extinction did not come at the tip of a spear. If human action helped to bring about mammoth extinction, it was not in such a direct fashion.

Both points are granted. For ELEPHANTS. Which are not Mastodons. They're very closely related, it's certainly true, but complex issues like "intelligence" (what the hell do we mean by that anyway?) and behaviour vary a lot over quite short taxonomic distances.
Humans, anatomically modern humans with a few percent of Neanderthal and another few percent of Denisovan,

Mammuts became extinct because of human overhunting. Also, the Earth has a great thermal diversity, so you just have to put them north of there original location. And if that's not enough, shaving off their fur will prevent them from overheating. At least the polar bears in the zoo of my city manage to survive each summer this way.

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat. They couldn't survive the end of the last ice age. So lets bring them to life and stick them in a post/anti-Ice Age environment... Brilliant!

We are currently in an ice age [wikipedia.org]. Mammoths died out very recently about 4,500 years ago. The world was pretty much the same back then.

Actually according to the Poncas there were a few woolly mammoths left around until about the 1200's. At least one tribe has a story of an extremely long winter when food supplies were running low, and they then went hunting and killed a woolly mammoth, and it saved the tribe.

Who knows what animals survived in small herds in the America's until the Europeans arrived.

It makes sense to me now! This mammoth business is a plot to lure Riko Tachibana [wikipedia.org] to do porn again by giving her a rare and massive toy to play with. It all comes together (along with the viewers).

Wired Mag had their article about this back in September. [wired.com]
I believe this to be an ethical issue that really needs to be thought through before folks go off tinkering with genes. As the article calls out, do we know what the impact to an ecosystem where a species like this is released? What about natural predation? In a broader sense, what is the real value in cloning something that was selectively removed from the environment? Hell we cannot even keep from releasing invasive species to control other species without completely screwing it up. This process does nothing more than allow a scientist to study an animal that doesn't exist by bringing it into existence.

Mainland mammoths were killed off by humanity before, without really trying. We can do it again. It will not become an expanding species with a notable effect on the ecosystem unless we help it to do so. In short, don't get upset over a non-issue.

(I say mainland because I've read that the last mammoths were isolated on an island and died off after many generations of becoming smaller to match a declining food supply.)

All of that is extremely unlikely to be an issue, considering they only have one sample of DNA that's any good. You would need AT least a male and female to start producing more mammoths in any kind of normal fashion, and you'd need a good number more than that to provide enough genetic diversity for them to be healthy.

While it's POSSIBLE we could eventually resurrect the species, it's unlikely, and we're not even close to that yet.

I'd be more worried if they were cloning ancient, long-extinct bacteria or even rodents.

Megafauna? People we pay for the privilege of helping make them re-extinct if they become a problem. Even a half-assed elimination effort could likely wipe them out in short order. Hell, just not protecting something like that would probably doom it.

I believe this to be an ethical issue that really needs to be thought through before folks go off tinkering with genes. As the article calls out, do we know what the impact to an ecosystem where a species like this is released? What about natural predation? In a broader sense, what is the real value in cloning something that was selectively removed from the environment? Hell we cannot even keep from releasing invasive species to control other species without completely screwing it up. This process does nothing more than allow a scientist to study an animal that doesn't exist by bringing it into existence.

The process does a lot more than that! It shows that we have the potential to actually bring extinct wild animals back into existence for ANY reason. Perfecting that capability is tremendously exciting from a scientific and evolutionary standpoint.

Obviously there are ethical implications. Like with other capabilities (moon landing, nuclear weapons, fracking), they will be debated as the technology is actively developed. Is that the "right" approach? Well, that's an ethical issue unto itself.

For a hunting preserve to be sustainable the reproduction rate of the animals has to be high enough to maintain the population of animals in the face of the hunting. Elephants are slow to reproduce (both in terms of how long it takes them to reach sexual maturity and in terms of rate of births) and need a lot of land so your sustainable hunting quota would be very low mammoths would be even worse.

Afaict we don't have elephant hunting preserves and I think it's highly unlikely we will ever have mammoth hunti

Every few years someone announces that they'll clone a mammoth within the next few years. I remember writing a science report about this in the 6th grade, around 1990-91. It'd be great if they finally do it, but I'm not holding my breath.

So they have the nucleic DNA - what about DNS from other intra-cellular bodies such as mitochondria? What about the epi-genetic effects of bringing a mammoth fetus to term inside another species? (Presumably an elephant.)

I think what they will end up with is an approximation of a mammoth, not an true instance of the species that became extinct 10,000 years ago.

That's part of the point. To learn how to clone an extinct species you have to start somewhere, you need to see what's missing. Granted, if you're close you might not necessarily know how close to the real species have you gone, but you will know if the approximation is good enough. After all, every species is an approximation. We no longer remember the mammoths, so any difference wouldn't matter. Who said that the approximation of mammoths that lived back then would be better than the approximation that we

So, it seems that after finding the "holy grail" of the missing genome, they have been set back by one year.

I did a lot of research about this back in January, when they first said that it was 5 years away. I heard a genome scientist interviewed on the radio, and he said that the resulting baby will be at most half Mammoth. It will have more elephant characteristics than mammoth, and will most likely be non-fertile, but it is still an important step to eventually having a fertile mammoth clone.

So, as much as I'd like to imagine mammoths in the zoo for my children to see, the truth is that we are still far from that point.

Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should be done. While resurrecting a long ago extinct species might be neat, think of all of the talent and research dollars going into it, when instead those resources could be used to help solve real world problems, like increased crop yields, alternative energy sources, finding cures, etc. None of those have the wow factor of producing another cloned mammal, particularly an extinct one, but all of them would be absolutely more meaningful to the human